The man known for innovating Sweden’s skinny jeans phenomenon a decade ago is loosening up just a bit as he opens the first store for his denim label.

Örjan Andersson, who created Cheap Monday jeans in 2004 and later sold it toH&M for a pretty penny, recently launched a new brand of denim that carries his own name. Regarded as a pioneer in the fashion industry thanks to his slim cut trousers, the designer with a signature red beard also blossomed into one of Sweden’s foremost fashion icons.

But instead of letting success get to his head, he’s opted to remain hip and a bit humble. He’s able to admit, for instance, that the cutting edge of fashion may be moving away from ultra-skinny jeans with saggy waists to something that is a bit the opposite.

He says that high waists and broader legs are getting more popular. Andersson, who made his fortune making skinny, has adjusted his designs.

“You know you have the ability to change your taste,” he says. A trip to his new shop. which opened Friday in Stockholm, further reflects his attitude.

The 5,400 square meter shop, dubbed Från Ö till A (translated “From Z to A), is situated in a rundown area of the Södermalm overlooking the elevated bridge that crosses the Hammarby canal. Andersson could care less if the store is off the beaten path.

“I’ve always enjoyed a shop that is situated a bit off, a shop that you have to get to.”

While the four-floor shop sells Andersson’s own jeans brand and other hot Swedish labels, like Acne, he also is focusing on dealing up-and-coming brands like Sweden’s AltewaiSaome and the U.K’s Marques Almeida.

The 41-year-old designer and a small staff have spent the last eight weeks converting the store from a vacant costume-rental shop into a white-walled fashionista theme park. Prior spending a few years lending out clothes to film and theater productions, the space served as a Church of Scientology.

The cavernous basement floor of his new shop features a big roof skylight, a café and a ping-pong table, and this is where Andersson sells second-hand clothes. He personally picks out the used duds from a secret second-hand warehouse outside Paris.

“The deal with second-hand clothes is that it’s really hard to duplicate the patina from second hand wear. We’ve tried to figure out how to replicate the wear, but it never looks as good as clothes that have been used for years.”

For his “Örjan Andersson” brand, denim is bought from a French supplier and then the final product is made in Tunisia. He does all the designs for his clothes.

Mr. Andersson, now wealthy, describes himself as a punk rocker at heart. “I really like the punk attitude, the do it yourself attitude.” Even with the owner doing so much work, including folding clothes and painting the walls, the store — which required the equivilent of a $150,000 initial investment — is not expected to be profitable anytime soon.

Andersson’s venture into the world of jeans started when he started working for Swedish jeans chain J&C back in 1991. At the turn of the millennium, Andersson and a partner opened their own second-hand clothing store in the outskirts of Stockholm, with a starting capital of 20,000 kronor($3000) each.

They hovered near bankruptcy in the early years, but fortunes turned in 2004 when they launched the Cheap Monday brand, which turned out to be an instant hit.

Cheap Monday, with its peculiar logo of a skull with an inverted crucifix on the forehead, revolutionized not only the look of chic jeans but the price tag. Cheap Monday sold its fashionable slim cut jeans for about $50 dollars and showed cutting edge fashion didn’t have to come with a hefty price tag.

“The year before we launched cheap Monday we were selling Seven Jeans,” that were very expensive, Andersson said. “If we sold ten pairs a day, we were making good money. But with Cheap Monday we started selling many more jeans and made even more money.”

The brand was such a success, that the world’s second biggest retailer, Sweden’s H&M, in 2008 bought the brand and the associated Weekday store, making the Cheap Monday founders multi-millionaires.

But he has had some fashion misses thoughout the years.

His most notable miss came one season when he worked at J&C and made jeans in a color he describes as Ahlgrens bilar, a type of light pink Swedish chewy candy. “We had so many of those jeans made and bought so much color, but that flopped.”